Bill Ackman’s Ruthless Quest to Oust College Presidents

As rumors swirled last week that the University of Pennsylvania’s president was being pressured to resign, billionaire investor Bill Ackman tweeted “One down.” 

Once it became official, the Harvard graduate turned his attention to the other two university presidents who struggled to condemn calling for the genocide of Jews when testifying before Congress last week. 

He wrote a letter to his alma mater’s governing board Sunday, reiterating his calls to remove Claudine Gay as president and fired off a tweet warning the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s boards that if they didn’t take action, he could send them a missive next. Harvard decided against removing Gay, it said Tuesday.

Within days of Hamas’s Oct. 7 attack on Israel, Ackman became one of the most vociferous wealthy donors criticizing their alma maters’ handling of antisemitism, using tactics he honed as a shareholder activist—an investing strategy he no longer practices.

He has remade himself as a social crusader and landed a starring role in a roiling debate over free speech and diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives on college campuses through a torrent of tweets and open letters to Harvard that have become increasingly hostile. 

“When I started out, this was all about antisemitism,” he told The Wall Street Journal on Monday evening. “The much bigger issue is this ideology on campuses…that has led to free speech being squelched.”

When asked how people should square his call for the school to punish pro-Palestinian protesters for chants commonly interpreted as calling for the genocide of Jews and his belief that Harvard is limiting free speech, Ackman said that the point is Harvard’s application of its policy appears selective and that speech proposing violence should be scrutinized.

He said he had just gotten off the phone with a U.S. senator who was commiserating with him and wondering whether Gay would have considered it harassment if students had called for genocide against Black people. “Would she have given the same answer?” Ackman asked.
 

Ackman’s bare-knuckled tactics are no surprise to those familiar with his career as an activist investor, which included a campaign against Herbalife that he once vowed to take “to the end of the earth.” (He ultimately abandoned the fight, which cost him hundreds of millions of dollars and contributed to his decision to turn away from shareholder-activist battles.)

Many outside of Wall Street heard Ackman’s name for the first time around Oct. 10, when he called on Harvard to release the names of members in the student groups that had signed a letter blaming Israel for Hamas’s actions. Critics said it encouraged doxing and endangered students; he said he wanted to prevent his hedge fund, Pershing Square Capital Management, and other employers from unknowingly hiring people who allegedly support terrorists. 

Ackman says he has a “visceral connectivity” to the issue, being Jewish himself and being married to an Israeli, the celebrity architect Neri Oxman. He has an undergraduate degree and an M.B.A. from Harvard and one of his four daughters graduated from there. His undergraduate thesis was titled “Scaling the Ivy Wall: The Jewish and Asian American Experience in Harvard Admissions.”

His first open letter to Gay, which he said he sent in early November after she didn’t respond to a bid to meet with him, was relatively tame, he said. He wrote that her failure to condemn Hamas’s acts in her initial statement following the rampage “opened the door for a wave of anti-Israel attacks on campus,” and he called on her to discipline pro-Palestinian protesters who he believed had encouraged violence against Jews. 

Ackman said he would have liked to see Harvard handle the issue more like Dartmouth, which has held forums in which faculty members on either side of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict exchanged ideas. “Universities are supposed to be a place about free speech and sharing ideas and discourse and getting to the truth,” Ackman said. “Instead, Harvard became a stomping ground for antisemitism.”  

He sent the letter after spending several hours meeting with students and faculty on campus, in which he wrote he was surprised to learn that the university’s DEI initiatives didn’t seem to extend to Jewish students. He says he never heard back from Gay, but received a flood of messages from other prominent donors and families of current students cheering him on. 

Harvard didn’t respond to a request for comment on Ackman. 

Unlike donors such as financier Ross Stevens and Apollo Global Management’s Marc Rowan, Ackman hasn’t explicitly tied his pressure campaign to his giving, though many consider the connection implicit. He said he has given $50 million to Harvard over the years, including $10 million in the past year-and-a-half.

Ackman criticized Gay on X, formerly known as Twitter, for declining an invitation to a screening of a documentary on Hamas’s atrocities due to a need to travel to Washington, D.C., to testify at the hearing. He said that he followed up by offering her a ride to the hearing on his private jet immediately after the viewing, but that she declined.

On Dec. 3, he wrote again to Gay, arguing that the issue extends beyond Jews and Israel and stems from an ideology on campus that sees the world in terms of oppressors and the oppressed and leads to discrimination against those classified as the former.

Ackman’s letter was later mentioned by Rep. Tim Walberg (R., Mich.) as he questioned the university presidents at the hearing.

After none of the presidents provided an unequivocal “yes” when asked by Rep. Elise Stefanik (R., N.Y.) if calls for the genocide of Jewish people would constitute harassment, Ackman called for the trio to “resign in disgrace.” He circulated betting odds for their exits from an obscure website that lets users put money on the outcome of certain events and, in a nod to his day job, said the schools’ proverbial stock prices had plummeted.

In recent days, as dueling petitions to both oust and retain Gay circulated, Ackman’s attacks on her became increasingly personal. He questioned her scholarship and alleged in his letter Sunday that Gay, a Black woman, was hired in a process that excluded nondiverse candidates.

Later that day, David Thomas, the president of Morehouse College and a professor of Ackman’s at Harvard, took to LinkedIn. While he said he applauded Ackman for calling attention to antisemitism at Harvard, he criticized his former student for questioning the legitimacy of Gay’s selection, calling his comments a dog whistle. “We must call it out,” he wrote. 

On Monday evening, Ackman tweeted that he had heard Harvard’s governing boards had decided not to fire Gay. He shared with his followers that two unnamed reporters told him part of the reasoning was that trustees wanted to avoid looking like they had been influenced by his tweets.

Write to Cara Lombardo at cara.lombardo@wsj.com